From London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851: Concerning street musicians, they are of multifarious classes. As a general rule, they may almost be divided into the tolerable and the intolerable performers, some of them trusting to their skill in music for the reward for their exertions, others only making a noise, so that whatever money they obtain is given to them merely as an inducement for them to depart.

We’ve had the pleasure of showing Marketa’s photographs of London on these pages before, and the pictures on here today are from her new book To Remember — London Street Musicians 1975–1990. This volume draws on Marketa’s intimacy with east and west London, as almost all the images are from the street markets around Brick Lane or those of the Portobello Rd..

Cheshire St., 1978.

Marketa is photographic royalty, a point emphasized by a couple of contributions to the new collection by two of her admirers. Shortly before he died, John Berger wrote the book’s foreword; and, opposite the dedication page, is a 1978 photo of Marketa and her young son Matthew travelling on a bus, an image by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Cheshire St., 1982.

The world Marketa documented has to a large extent disappeared; apart from anything else, both east and west London have been transformed by gentrification and ‘social cleansing’. Some of the street performers in her pictures look as if they might be illustrations out of Mayhew’s 1850 accounts of London street types; these photographs have a timeless quality. Ironically, the pictures that seem slightly tied to period are the ones of younger, ‘alternative’ street performers, a phenomenon indelibly associated with the 1970s and 1980s.

Covent Garden, 1978.

As I’ve said before, Marketa has an amazing gift for empathy and an ability to get inside a situation without imposing her presence on it. It is clear that she knew many of these performers very well; and if you look carefully, you can see the infant Matthew in a couple of the pictures, his presence a reminder that Marketa had to keep her eye on him as well as the musicians she was photographing. This is photography as a way of life, as a way of being. She was meeting the street performers on an equal footing; she was as much a part of their landscape as they were of hers.

Portobello Rd., 1975.

You don’t need me to tell you how moving these photographs are. In the previous entry we devoted to Marketa I wrote about her astonishing picture of a man singing in the street, which for me is one of the greatest photographs of a performer made by anyone anywhere. A few of the street musicians in her photos have clearly lost hope; but it is the images of those giving their all that are the most poignant. I have no idea whether ‘Caruso’ in the image at the top of this page was a good turn or not – but on the basis of this picture I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. If anyone was ever prepared to ‘fail better’ it had to be him. (I am also, inevitably, reminded of this famous recording which has at its heart the song of a homeless man on a London street.)

To launch To Remember, Marketa will be discussing her work with Andrew Dempsey on Monday 13 February at Leila’s Shop, 15–17 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP. From 6.30 pm.. To reserve a seat (recommended) email info@leilasshop.com.

The address is a unit on an industrial estate in West London in the shadow of a mouldering brutalist tower block that would have looked ugly in Soviet-era East Berlin. Even though it’s a Sunday, 747s on final approach to Heathrow growl endlessly overhead and the traffic on the North Circular rumbles incessantly across a flyover not a hundred yards away. The unit’s door is locked and, after some minutes trying to get a response from the intercom entry system, you lose patience. You try several tactics: shouting, pressing the buzzer for sustained periods of time, eventually succumbing to violence, smashing the already broken intercom unit with your fist and, finally, your face. At last, as if by magic, the door opens. It’s a young chap in full evening dress.

‘Oh, hello. Bloody thing’s broken,’ he says, cheerily, indicating the now cracked and bloodied intercom. ‘Go on in – everyone’s in the green room.’ He pulls out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You all right? You’ve cut your forehead.’

You stare at him for a moment in disbelief. ‘You’re wearing a tuxedo.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He looks a little sheepish. ‘Well, you know, I thought, James Bond…’

‘Andy, mate, hi! I was wondering if you were available tomorrow. I know it’s short notice and, unfortunately, we can only offer expenses, but I’ve been lumbered. I don’t think you’ve met Terry – the guy who owns the studio – but he’s been asked to tender for a string of idents for a new commercial radio station. I wouldn’t usually ask, but things are pretty tight at the moment and we really need this. I mean, no one’s being paid – Terry’s taking a loss on this. The thing is, we’re in competition with a few other studios for this gig, so it’s got to sound classy and for that, of course, we need top talent, hence: this phone call. The thing is, if they like what we do, they’ll put a lot more work our way. It could be a regular little earner. It’s a James Bond spoof – should be fun.’

Let’s deconstruct this a little.

The upfront “Are You Available?” from “Mate” is designed to grab your attention; the promise of work sets any actor’s heart beating just that little bit faster. All hopes are immediately dashed, however, by the word “tomorrow”, which could not state more clearly that his first second, third and possibly fourth choices have turned him down. But as your capacity for dealing with disappointment and ignoring tactlessness has been honed by years of practice, you think, Hey, it’s a job, let’s not be too precious.

Then he hits you with, “We can only offer expenses”. The beautiful dawn of hope just risen in your breast – complete with birdsong and the gentle plashing of heavenly fountains – not to mention the wonderful vision of you striding manfully into your local NatWest with a large cheque (or even a small one) is replaced by a feeling akin to leaping from a hot air balloon clutching an anvil. This feeling, however, is short-lived as, almost immediately, with the realisation you’re being taken advantage of, pressure builds in the magma chamber of rage called your heart, which, swollen by years of poor pay, poor conditions, and being taken advantage of by ‘Mates’, searches for release. Knowing this, and anxious not to have his eardrums blown out by your pyroclastic fury, he follows up almost immediately with the “I’ve Been Lumbered” ploy, designed to both deflect blame away from him and to prevent you from venting your molten rage which you must now swallow.

After all, it’s not his fault, but the fault of someone higher up the pecking order, in this case, the “Studio Owner”. This tactic implies that Mate’s hands are tied: that uncaring management is breathing down his neck and you are his only hope of salvation. This is not true. Mate – the studio recording engineer – and the studio owner are, in all probability, business partners and this little plan was no doubt hatched over a three-bottle-lunch at the local gastropub. And finally, the icing on the cake, the promise of future and regular work. This, both you and he know, is a myth but, paradoxically, is almost always the clincher.

You consider your options for a few moments.

‘When you say, expenses..?’ you ask.

‘We’ll pay your rail fare, petrol money… Tell us how much you need.’

Translation: We’ll give you a tenner.

‘When do you need to know?

‘Now.’

This is what’s known as the rush, designed to leave you no time to think or to talk things over with your spouse. And yet, however many times you hear this tired old argument and, despite knowing it’s all bollocks, you somehow still find yourself saying,

‘Well, OK.’

After all, it might not be a bad way to pass the morning: there’s bound to be someone you know there and it’s always nice meeting old friends. Besides, the studio – on Greek Street – has got leather sofas, a coffee machine, free Wi-Fi and Sky Television in the green room.

‘Oh, by the way, our studio’s being refurbished – so we’ve had to relocate temporarily. We’re on an industrial estate near Acton – I’ll email you the address.’

You put the phone down, feeling used and slightly soiled. Nevertheless, somewhere between the phone and the kitchen, you somehow manage to convince yourself that allowing yourself to be exploited by people well able to pay you is a noble calling.

Spouse sits at the kitchen table, elbow deep in bank statements and bills, and immediately you have one of those tingly, out-of-body experiences, born of the sudden recollection that tomorrow you promised to look after the kids while Spouse’s rich best friend – who has a lead part in a long-running soap – was going to treat her to lunch at the Ivy: a long looked-forward to treat; a little oasis of glamour in the otherwise endless grey desert of child-centred domesticity.

‘You’ve done what?’

‘Well…’ you begin unsurely, ‘As you said yourself, I can’t really afford to turn anything down at the moment and…’ You find yourself reiterating the lies Mate has just fed to you. They sound even more ridiculous in your own mouth. You talk of the future: although there’s no money this time, who knows what may happen further on down the line? It could lead to more work… I could be in on the ground floor of something huge!

The rest of the day passes in tight-lipped silence and, following the unwritten laws that underpin marriage, you cover yourself in ashes and pay penance. You take out the rubbish, you walk the dog, you rush to change every shit-soiled nappy, you cook supper – her favourite: seared tofu in quinoa with grated raw celeriac – you eschew watching the final episode of Breaking Bad in favour of Strictly Come Dancing and, when it seems you can sink no lower, you find yourself phoning her mother to thank her for the fingerless gloves she sent you for your birthday and allow her to tell you the details of her recent hysterectomy.

You push past the Moss Bross-suited youth and find yourself standing on a thin, water-stained carpet in a dank reception area smelling slightly of damp – hardly the womb-like, leather-clad, luxury experience you were looking forward to. Following the sound of voices, you pass down a small corridor which eventually opens out into a sort of green room, equipped with the latest in used Styrofoam cups and melted plastic spoons. The instant coffee jar is empty because most of it’s in the sugar bowl and the only tea bags on offer are the squeezed-out ones lined up by the kettle. The young cast lounge on a selection of ancient, mismatched furniture of indeterminate colour. The sofa, as specified in the standard non-Equity contract, is mouldy, stained and leaks stuffing like a squashed cockroach. On a small table in front of it is a large foil dish on which are the remains of lunch – your lunch. In a tangle of Clingfilm lie half a tomato, a green smudge of mustard and cress, a dollop of egg mayonnaise and half a sausage roll. You search in vain for a familiar face, then feel a slap on the back as someone bellows in your ear,

‘Andy, my old darling, how are you?’

You turn and find yourself staring into the face of a man you hoped you would never see again. Indeed, after the last time you worked together, you told yourself you would rather eat your own liver than repeat the experience. To the list of people one should never work with, just after animals, small children and, of course, amateurs, should be added, The Desperate.

‘Michael,’ you say, attempting to replace your look of horror with something approaching friendliness. You can’t. Your face is beyond your control, like an alien clamped to your head it refuses to obey your commands and draws itself instead into a half-scowl, your lip curling upwards while your eyes narrow beneath knotted brows. You end up looking like a dodgy impersonation of Bert Kwouk.

Michael grabs your arm and pushes you into a corner. ‘So, how are things?’ Without waiting for an answer, Michael leans in, too close, and mutters ‘I haven’t worked for nine months,’ as his fingers crush your forearm, his stale breath brushing your cheek like the stench from a recently-opened tomb. After twenty minutes or so, when Michael draws breath in the middle of a deeply disturbing anecdote about a dresser, a pasty and a tube of KY, you ask if there’s a script. Michael, momentarily wrong footed, pauses long enough for you to free yourself from his iron grip and go off in search of what are known in the business as ‘sides’: the loose leaves of script that are usually provided on these occasions. Your eye lights on a pile of tea- and tomato-stained pages on the table.

As you read, your heart sinks even further – it’s beyond execrable. You consider walking out the door. But you can’t. Mate sometimes does pull you in for the odd paid job, and, despite his unforgivable exploitation of you on this occasion, you want to keep in his good books.

You’re stuck.

When you look up from the script, Michael catches your eye again, so you hide in the loo.

Twenty minutes later, Mate comes and finds you, asks if you’ve had everything you need, whether you had lunch, if you’ve had a coffee.

‘No,’ you say.

‘Great,’ says Mate. ‘Have you seen the script?’

‘Well…’ you begin.

‘Great,’ says Mate again, ‘I was up all night working on it. I’m rather pleased with it. You’re playing Q – you know the sort of stuff, lots of jargon. It’s just the one scene, with Moneypenny and Bond, should be very funny.’

One scene, you think – how long can that take?

Thankfully – as Michael is likely to argue with anyone who will listen about the interpretation, pace, volume and intensity of every word – your scene is not with him; it is with the evening-suited youth and the blonde ingénue playing Moneypenny.

At last, the cast is assembled around the microphone, scripts in hand.

‘OK,’ says ‘Mate’ over the headphones, or, ‘cans’ as they’re known in the business. ‘I’ll give you a green.’

The green light just under the microphone blinks on and off. Nothing happens. “Moneypenny” has the first line, but remains dumb, frowning intently at the script as if it’s one of Kierkegaard’s knottier propositions.

Mate comes over the cans. ‘Anything wrong?’

You realise what the problem is: “Moneypenny” is not wearing cans. ‘Hang on,’ you say, taking a pair of headphones hanging from the mic stand and passing them to her.

She looks at you as if you’re something stuck to her shoe. ‘Do I have to wear those? They’ll ruin my hair.’

‘Yes, you have to wear them, otherwise the recording engineer won’t be able to communicate with you.’

She grabs them bad-naturedly, placing them deliberately but delicately over her expensively-coiffed hair.

‘Right, can everybody hear me now?’

“Moneypenny” scowls up at Mate beaming through the glass window of the control box. ‘OK, yah.’

Mate gives a thumbs up. ‘Let’s try that again. Green coming.’

The cue light blinks on again. Nothing, again.

‘What’s that little green light for?’

As patiently as rage will allow, you answer: ‘It’s a cue light. When it blinks, you speak.’

You can sense Mate’s patience wearing thin. It’s the only enjoyable moment of the day so far.

‘Ah,’ says Mate, ‘It’s like this: Moneypenny is M’s secretary, and-’

‘Who’s M?’

‘Yeah, um… er… Andy, you can probably explain better than me…’

Bugger him.

‘OK, er, Matilda, is it?’

She stares at you like you’ve just dropped your trousers.

‘It’s like this…’ You explain, as succinctly as possible, the set up, the history, the mores and quirks of a franchise that has been running for nigh-on sixty years, at the end of which she gawps at you incredulously.

‘Sounds like something my grandfather might have watched.’

‘He probably did.’

‘Well how am I supposed to know about it then?’

‘Well, it is common knowledge amongst most people who haven’t spent the past decade studying Persian ceramics.’

‘Assyrian, actually. Are you taking the piss?’

When you finally leave the studio it’s dark. Managing to avoid Michael and his inevitable invitation to go for a drink (you’d be paying), you melt away into the night. Trying as best you can to purge your mind of the memory of the day, you pick up a bottle of Chateau Londis on the way home. In your mind’s eye, Spouse greets you at the door, sees past the wilting offering to the thought behind the gesture and beams her gratitude.

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she says, ‘Your day sounds awful. Well, don’t worry, Matthew’s asleep, I’ve made a chilli and we can settle down in front of the TV with a film.’

The reality doesn’t live up to expectation. You walk through the front door to World War Three – the baby is screaming, a smell of burning pervades the kitchen and your flowers look even worse in the cold light of disdain. Now, you reckon, is not the moment to tell her that you’ve blown the tenner you were paid on wine and flowers.

Spouse orders you to take charge of the kitchen while she puts the baby to sleep – again; you open the wine and are halfway through the bottle by the time dinner – slightly singed – is ready.

Finally, settling down on the sofa in front of the news, with a steaming bowl of what might have once been minced meat, but now has the consistency of grit, you ask your beloved how her day has been. Compared to your day, she has been through the equivalent of the Anzacs’ landing on Gallipoli. With an attempt at levity, you say, ‘Well, it’s better than working…’ This is not wise.

Dawn slants in through the venetian blinds and worms its way under your eyelids and you wonder, not for the first time, when you last spent the night sleeping on the sofa.

Never again, you promise yourself. From now on I will value myself and my talent and on no condition let myself be exploited by unscrupulous “Mates”.

Happy with your resolve, you roll over and try to move your body into a position where the sofa’s broken spring is not poking you in the back. Then, just as you are drifting back to sleep, the phone rings.

Balfron Tower. I love it. It anchors Poplar, it looms over the A12 just by the Blackwall Tunnel approach, and it seems to defend that whole end of Tower Hamlets. In the evenings, when the sun reaches a certain point, it glows golden. You couldn’t help but find it beautiful, its slightly Escher-esque planes and shapes and perspectives changing with the weather and the light, its strange humanity, its arrow-slit windows. Just as the now-demolished gasometers in Stepney did, it casts its grandeur over everything around.

Poor Balfron suffers the slings and arrows of public disgust towards its whole genre. People think ‘the New Brutalism’ is called that just because it’s brutal, but in fact, it’s a play on the French term ‘béton brut’, for raw concrete. It’s easy to forget now that when this architecture went up, it was intended to make life better for people. Goldfinger referred to its corridors as ‘streets in the sky’, and the plan included incredibly optimistic landscaping: Balfron has private yards for the bottom flats, mature trees and shrubberies shielding it from the A12, and light coming at it from all directions. Its flats meander up and down levels, and have balconies and stupendous views.

The flats themselves are large by tower-block standards, & packed with space-saving devices. … Doors of wood & glass slide rather than open out, & can be used to partition certain parts of each flat. Glass is plentiful in order to let in as much natural light as possible… Adjoining the main tower is a service tower. This incorporates lifts, stairs, & refuse chutes, as well as a boiler house. The lifts stop at every third floor, meaning that in some flats the bedrooms are above, & in some below, the entrance level. The flats have large balconies which, if you are high enough up, offer views across the North Downs.

My own personal knowledge of Balfron Tower reached its zenith in 2001, when, as a publicity officer for Tower Hamlets’ housing department, I toured the place with a deputation from Trellick Tower, and a member of its resident management committee. The reason they were visiting was very simple: Trellick was in trouble and needed a major overhaul. (The figure given at the time was £9m to get it up to its original standard.) Balfron and Trellick are ‘sister buildings’; Goldfinger learned some lessons from Balfron, but by 2001 they were like twins raised separately.

Trellick had, being in (even if only north) Kensington, been gentrified while the East End was still thought of as a wild space. Its tenants were that bit more prosperous, and more able to get mortgages, and had bought their flats under Right to Buy. However, many new owners didn’t have the money to maintain the flats – or else they did have the money, and took out original features. Kensington’s reputation for affluence got in the way of attempts to secure funding. They had a vandalism problem, and some of the original features – such as the marble that had been in the entry area – had been stolen. The building had been designed to have a concierge but for many years it never had one. No one was – literally – keeping an eye on things. It was in a bad spot.

Balfron, by contrast, had had a boring life, with tenants instead of leaseholders, and with several rounds of major works on it – new windows, for example, and new asphalt in the external linking walkways. It also had more of its original features, like the quarry tiles lining the corridors – different colours on different floors – and its flats had more of their original fittings – for example their bakelite light switches instead of Thatcherite gold-look ones. And Balfron had had one asset money can’t buy: it had had one very hands-on, community-spirited caretaker for almost twenty years.

I interviewed Irvine Gallagher, otherwise known as Jock, for the council’s newspaper, East End Life, around the time of this tour of the block. (I knew him a bit to have a drink with; when I rang him to suggest the interview, there was a long silence, and then he growled: ‘IN THE PUB.’) He told me, ‘When we took over this estate from the good old GLC it was a disaster area. Burnt-out cars, black soot stains, bin rooms full of old rubbish’.

‘No one knows as much as me about Balfron Tower’, he said. ‘I know how the whole building works, where everything is. I’ve had calls from housing management, architects, heating engineers. They wanted to put in new central heating but it’s listed, they couldn’t run the gas pipes up the outside – I identified where the cupboards were, and internal routes where they could run their pipes. I know how the flats fit together, this one on one level, this one on two – I always know where the water’s coming from’.

Jock was a people person, though, as well as being able to do 3D mental mapping. ‘I know everything that happens here’, he said. ‘Everybody knows me and I know everybody . I know all the kids, who their mums and dads are. I’ll knock on someone’s door if I’ve seen them doing something. Nine times out of ten people are grateful and say they didn’t know their kid was doing whatever.

‘But there isn’t much vandalism. We’ve got CCTV, and if a kid is doing something we can see them. We call out the window, “Smile for the camera!” You should see them run!’

Happy days. Also around the time of this interview, Jock had to apply for his job, as the council was bringing in ‘super-caretakers’ – a sort of Blairite caretaker-manager position. I spoke to him right after his interview and he said it had gone really badly. It lasted five minutes.

Five minutes! What went wrong?? ‘Well what was I supposed to do’, he growled down the phone. ‘Spend an hour talking about fucking BLEACH.’

So the job went to someone else, and Jock became an under-caretaker, and I heard last year that he had recently passed on.

My other personal connection with Balfron Tower is that when I was working in that job, my marriage had broken up and my children and I were living in adorable but extreme overcrowding in a wisteria-garlanded one-bedroom flat in Hackney. Things were difficult, and at just this juncture a flat came on the market in Balfron Tower for something like £37,900. But Balfron was in Poplar, and my kid were in school in Stoke Newington, and you couldn’t raise a mortgage in Poplar (or a tower block) to save your life, and I had no savings at all… In one corner of my brain I have always lived there.

I left that job few months after the Balfron tour and the interview with Jock, and have no idea how Balfron Tower fell into the situation it’s in today. It’s about to have the makeover of a lifetime, which will also catapult it into a new social class. Indeed, as life imitates art, the millennial city imitates the famous ‘I Love My Life as a Dickhead’ video, wherein the hipsters have taken over Trellick Tower. For with the ensuing works, and the the huge project of decanting all of Balfron’s tenants underway, Balfron’s flats have been let all year at cheap rents to artists, to keep the place full – and, presumably, soften up a tiny little social transformation.

Balfron went to sleep as a brave and plucky social housing experiment; is currently dreaming a strange technicolor dream; and will wake up, what only feels like a lifetime later, a princess.

And it’s some slight consolation to know that, if I had bought that flat all those years ago, I’d have a big headache just about now.

A friend came to see me on one of the evenings of the last week — he thinks it was on Monday, August 3rd. We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time’.

From Twenty-Five Years 1892-1916 (New York, 1925) by Viscount Grey of Fallodon, formerly Sir Edward Grey. Sir Edward Grey was British Foreign Secretary in August 1914; Britain declared war on Germany on August 4th.

There used to be a pub called The Princess Alice on Commercial Street in Whitechapel. I passed it every morning on my way to work; it intrigued me because it had a weird pub sign depicting a woman in a Victorian outfit – which, on closer examination, you saw was actually a corpse wearing a crinoline dress. I didn’t make any connection between the name of the pub and the significance of the sign until I spent a day walking along the Thames with a friend who is intimately acquainted with the history of London and the Thames Estuary in particular. He told me the story of the Princess Alice, a Victorian paddle steamer at the centre of London’s greatest peacetime disaster, a disaster especially significant for London’s East End.

The Princess Alice was a passenger vessel used for pleasure cruises and day trips, opportunities for working class Londoners to visit places like Southend on Sea, Sheerness and Gravesend. On Sunday 3rd of September 1878 she was returning from one such trip, packed with east enders who had paid two shillings each for the privilege of visiting Rosherville Gardens in Gravesend. At about 7.40pm she was almost in sight of North Woolwich Pier, where many passengers were to disembark, when the Newcastle-bound collier Bywell Castle – a 900 ton coal barge steaming with the outgoing tide – came into view. Apparently the skipper of the Bywell Castle, Captain Harrison, had spotted the lights of the Princess Alice and had correctly set a course to pass to the starboard of her. However, the skipper of the Princess Alice, Captain William Grinstead, followed an old seaman’s practice of finding the slack water of an out going tide and this put the two vessels on a direct collision course. Harrison attempted to reverse engines, but to no avail; his heavy iron ship rammed the dainty pleasure cruiser and split her in two.

To compound matters, raw sewage from the pumping stations at Barking and Crossness had been discharged into the Thames just an hour earlier. The Princess Alice sank in less than four minutes, and the hundreds of passengers on board were engulfed in a river of filth. Over 650 died, although the exact figure is unknown. After the disaster a Board of Trade inquiry found that Captain Grinstead, who had drowned in the tragedy, was responsible, although this verdict was widely disputed. The inquiry also found that the Princess Alice was substantially overloaded and offered inadequate means of escape for her passengers. As a result of the disaster a Port to Port regime “with no exceptions” was instigated for shipping on the River Thames, and this stands to this day.

A memorial cross paid for by public subscription was raised at Woolwich Cemetery , and there is a stained glass window commemorating the disaster in St Mary Magdalene’s Church in the same borough. An information plaque about the disaster is at Tripcock Point (marked on ordnance Survey map as Tripcock Ness, roughly opposite Creekmouth/Barking Barrier, where the Outfall Sewer walk finishes). And, it would seem, a public house was re-named to commemorate the tragedy. In fact, it seems likely that the name ‘Princess Alice’ may have been chosen due to the supposed Jack the Ripper connection to the disaster. Jack’s third victim Elizabeth Stride had claimed that she was a survivor of the shipwreck, and that her husband and children had been lost in the disaster. The unfortunate Elizabeth was murdered ten years after the Princess Alice tragedy, and was killed just a few yards away from the location of the pub. However, her story was a pathetic fabrication, as her husband had succumbed to TB and the couple had never had children. In any case, the tenuous link to Whitechapel’s most infamous tourist attraction obviously proved irresistible to one publican, and it is not the first time that a Whitechapel hostelry has attempted to cash-in on the area’s grisly heritage. In the 1970s The Ten Bells was re-named The Jack the Ripper which, given the fact that some of Jack’s victims had been patrons of said pub, was in staggeringly bad taste.

Before I could take a close-up of The Princess Alice’s sign, the pub was unexpectedly refurbished and re-named Culpeper; this is after Nicholas Culpeper, a Doctor, Herbalist and radical Republican who had set up a pharmacy in Spitalfields in the 1630’s. The Culpeper link is undoubtedly more appropriate for the 21st Century East End; where once was violence and grinding poverty, now there are designer outlets, stratospherically expensive houses and family-friendly pubs. Anyway, another link to London’s greatest ever civilian disaster seems to be lost, although the new owners of the Culpeper did tell me that they intend to keep The Princess Alice sign and put it on display. My own memorial to the tragedy is the pictures I have taken of the Thames Estuary, of the shores that would have been familiar to those aboard the Princess Alice, ghosts of the routes the doomed paddle steamer once plied.

I was born right by Old Street roundabout on January 1st, 1927. Some of the kids used to beat me up – but in a friendly way. Hoxton was full of characters in those days. The Mayor was called Mr. Brooks and he was also a chimney sweep. Guess what? Before the coronation, he was putting up decorations and he fell off a ladder and got killed. Well, it happens. Then there was a six-foot tall girl, she was really massive. She used to attack people and put them in police vans. Maria was her name. Then there was Brotsky who used to kill chickens with a long stick. His son’s name was Monty. That’s not a common one is it? ‘Monty Brotsky’.

I worked two years as a cabinet maker in Hemsworth Street just off Hoxton market. But when my sinuses got bad I went to Hackney Road putting rivets on luggage cases. For about twenty years I did that job. My foreman was a bastard. Apart from that it was OK. But if I was clever, very clever, then I would have liked to be an accountant. It’s a very good job. And if I was less heavy … you know what I’d like to be? I’d like to be a ballet dancer. That would be my dream.

I don’t mind people taking pictures of me. But I wouldn’t let a girl take a picture of me. She might have a boyfriend. I don’t want any trouble. And who knows, he might think she wants to run off with me. You got to be careful where you go nowadays. Martin, if you want to take this picture you had better be quick. I don’t take a good picture when my bladder is full.

If I try, I can imagine the future. It’s like watching a film. Pavements will move, nurses will be robots and cars will get smaller and grow wings … you’ve just got to wait. They will make photographs that talk. You will look at a picture of me and you will hear me say: ‘Hello I’m Jospeph Markovitch’ and then it will be me telling you abut things. Imagine that! I also have an idea that in about fifty years Hoxton Square will have a new market with an amazing plastic rain cover. So if it rains the potatoes won’t get wet. I don’t know what else they will sell. Maybe bowler hats. Nothing much changes round here in the end.